RSSEvidence tabs will get more attention in future Firefox releases
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published September 8, 2008, 7:25 PM
Google's Chrome developers -- some of whom have worked, and are still working, on Firefox -- acknowledged their debt of gratitude for Firefox's inspiration. But today's latest development in Firefox 3.1 suggests it's now playing catch-up.
Last week's release of Google Chrome placed a new emphasis on the tab as the repository for a Web browser, rather than the Web browser as the central location for tabs. Whether or not that catches on, the concept may be compelling developers to treat tabs more seriously, and the latest alpha build of Firefox 3.1 is an indication of this.
This afternoon, BetaNews constructed a new virtual Windows XP Professional machine in order to get a good, clean look at Shiretoko, the code-name for Mozilla's forthcoming Firefox 3.1. One of the features noted on the change log for Shiretoko is added support for dragging and dropping of tabs between open browser windows.
Now, if you're a veteran Firefox user already, you may think you can already do this. Yes, you can drag a tab from one Firefox 3.0 browser window into the workspace of another open browser window, with the result being that the URL from that dragged tab will be loaded into the other window's tab, taking the place of whatever was there before. And you can drag a tab into the address bar of another open window, accomplishing the same thing. In both cases, what Firefox 3.0 will do is simply trigger the receiving window to reload the same page from the Web.
What the Shiretoko team is working on is an effort at what they describe as, essentially, no longer faking it. What they want to do is move the content of the already open window without reloading the Web page, enabling the existing page to be scooted from container to container.
In BetaNews tests this afternoon, we discovered that, as Grandfather famously said in the classic movie Little Big Man, sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it doesn't. For instance, we noticed that in Shiretoko, a Web page with mostly text and no editing controls, could be transferred from open window to open window without the recipient window ever reloading the page. When this happens, the open tab in the "from" window disappears, so you really are shuffling tabs between windows without intervention from the Web.
When that page had a more sophisticated DOM construction, however, the situation changed. On a page that has a multitude of editing controls, we tried entering text in some of those controls, to see whether that text would survive a transfer between open windows. It does survive...about six times out of ten. Sometimes the text we entered disappears, most often when trying to move an already moved tab back to the window from whence it came. And about one time in ten, Shiretoko cheats and reloads the original page from the Web, Firefox 3.0-style.
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| Mozilla Firefox 3.1 alpha "Shiretoko," running in a Windows XP Professional virtual machine. Here we're dragging a tab from one window direcly into a toolbar belonging to another window. |
Also in our first tests of Shiretoko this afternoon, we noted that you can take a tab from one window and drop it into the links bar of another open window. In other words, the toolbars are now receptive to drags and drops from other windows. For Shiretoko's sake, this is a minor feature addition; but the underlying meaning could be more profound: Firefox's window adornments are becoming receptive to outside input...like Chrome's.
A browser window that "listens" to more user events may, in future alpha builds, have the freedom to go beyond the ordinary browser window enclosure, operating as a more independent, more functional device. A bigger, better gathering place for tabs is one possibility.
Conversation between Mozilla's developers -- on a thread about drag-and-drop that really did start in 2001 -- has this week become heated, with some suggesting it may take a serious rethinking of the underlying tabbrowser class in order for developers to integrate some of the next concepts on their list. In BetaNews tests, we noticed you couldn't drag a tab from one window into the bookmarks list of another; and while that might not be something the everyday user would want to do in the current setup of Firefox, a future setup where some tabbed windows are independent of another main window, could eventually mandate such functionality.
Another major new feature being tested in Firefox 3.1 is its built-in video and audio codecs, which enable use of the <VIDEO> and <AUDIO> tags that will be part of the next XHTML HTML 5 standard. We'll test those next.
If one tab goes crazy how do you know which chrome.exe to kill?
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|Good point. CPU or RAM usage may be an indication, but not positive indentification. One would hope that the main program would eventually allow for graceful termination of its children.
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|You right click on the area that would have the title (let's just say right click on the word Google) and click on task manager. You then close the tab from Chrome's internal task manager.
A very computer literate friend of mine made the same mistake by thinking that CTRL-ALT-DELETE was how one was supposed to do this.
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|Kill them all!
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|For me you have to right-click the blue bar that runs across the top of the window before Task Manager is an option.
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|"area that would have the title" = "blue bar" = "titlebar".
Same thing, same effect. They messed with the "standard" windows UI, thus creating confusion.
I like the browser and all, but unless they start allowing skinning, they *need* to conform to the Windows UI on Windows. It looks like crap as it stands now...
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|You won't have to worry about it. When those tabs go crazy, the best you can do is duck for cover and hope they didn't see you. ;)
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|Ignore it until you are done browsing.
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|Yeah, I use Chrome on a Google spreadsheet and I keep trying to use the right-click functionality that Google spreadsheets have in Firefox (and presumably IE, it's Google's Java code, not standard windows or firefox right-click stuff) but right-click does nothing!
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|What Chrome does is something completely different... Each tab isn't really a "tab" per se. They are a bunch of instances of individual browsers snapped together in a single "window."
When you do this, it's easy to move it about or detach it. All you're doing is detaching the GUI of that web page from the rest, or moving it around. The browser itself remains entirely intact.
What Firefox does is handle things on a thread-by-thread basis, instead of separate instances or the browser (separate processes). This makes the browser on a whole use less memory with many tabs, but the side effect is clunkier interaction when trying to manipulate these tabs, since it's not very efficient to rip a thread out of one process and recreate it inside another...
In fact, I think Firefox should drop trying to use this method altogether and just go multi-process like Chrome. It's just *SO* much cleaner and efficient, even if it takes more RAM.
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|The thing about that is Chrome doesn't really use that much more memory with several tabs open. Maybe 5% if that.
However, the benefits of seperate processes is enormous:
1. No more crashing of the entire browser when only one of the tabs has an issue.
2. When you close a tab, you gain 100% of that tab's memory back.
If Firefox can't fix the previous two problems with their current implementation method, then they will almost certainly be forced to go Chrome's route.
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|Last I checked, Chrome uses around 25 MB of RAM for the main host process and maybe around 7 MB for an empty sub process. (These numbers are loose, ofc. That's just what it was on my system). I wouldn't say it's a 5% increase... it's clearly more like 25-30%, but ok. It's still not much memory on a whole, the browser is just so light. (Which is why I love it so much).
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|I've been following the evolution of this feature for the last couple years (as a "voter" for it in bugzilla) and I'm glad to see it starting to come to life. It's true that developers can't do everything at once, but perhaps the best thing to come from Chrome is some of these longstanding things being integrated into FF at last, "catch up" or not.
I do wonder how the "politics" of people working on both browsers plays out. Seems like that would cause some conflicts eventually, either time or priorities or both. I personally yawn at Chrome but I do like having another good rendering browser in the mix from a dev perspective.
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|FF is going to have a hard time playing 'catchup' as Chrome is able to do many of these things based upon the software's core structure ... Firefox can really only fake a lot of these things.
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|Chrome needs to catch up by adding FlashBlock or AdBlock or NoScript. The amount of flashing ads that attack me in Chrome is frightening.
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|How do you rate the chance of that happening since google LIVES on advertising. ? :)
That is probably what will make chrome a no go for me for the forseable future.
Chrome does not seem to have an open extension architecture anyway.
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|The ads everywhere were horrible, and I didn't have very many customization options at all for the browser.
Yeah, I don't see where all of these great reviews from Chrome is even coming from. I tried it last night last and had nothing but problems. The middle mouse button would half the time open up a new tab and the other half of the time it would steal my current tab and take me to that link...very annoying! I also had a problem with it just loading up simple small gif files on some pages with up to 5 times reloading the page to get them to appear, with no mouse option to reload image, even when it's not displaying.
I tried it for about 5 hours and from what I've seen I'll give it a thumbs down.
The separate process is a great idea and I believe might be good if properly executed in a working, fully developed browser, but until then I will continue to live with Firefox 250-300mgs of space.
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|Agreed.
I've been using it since launch as my only browser, mainly due to the speed.
Going from no ads to tons of them is disturbing.
The google ones aren't so bad, but the flash embedded *inside* stories is annoying to say the least.
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|I sure hope you were not blocking Betanews' ads, now, were you? ;)
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|They have ads at BetaNews?
Never saw them... :)
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|The ones in the center of the articles, you bet.
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|I doubt that Admuncher (not free) is the only
system wide ad blocker--it filtered adverts in
G. Chrome from C.'s first instance here, no
trouble at all.
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|I turned the tabs off.
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|The tags aren't capitol they are lower case >.>
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|Minor nit - XHTML is basically dead. Video and Audio support will be in HTML5.
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|The draft HTML 5 spec appears to say that it also defines an XHTML 5 (though possibly not with that name), so XHTML is not dead.
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